Boyhood, By Accident: How Time Became the Co-Author of the Calvin Cycle

There is a question readers sometimes ask, usually after finishing A Pleasant Fiction: How long did all of this take to write?

It’s an innocent question, but it misses the larger truth. These books did not simply take a long time; they were written by different versions of the same person. The Calvin cycle is not a single project stretched across decades. It is a series of encounters between a character and the changing consciousness of the writer who kept aging around him. In that sense, the entire duology resembles Richard Linklater’s Boyhood—not because I set out to mimic his experiment, but because life replicated it on the page without my permission.

Becoming Calvin was written in the late 1990s, in the quiet, electric period after my wedding. I was newly married and certain that adulthood would clarify itself in short order, the way a room sharpens when the lights come on. The early chapters carry that young man’s metabolism—his confidence, his ambition, his need to understand himself in motion. If there is a kind of sweetness to the prose, it is because I had not yet lost the people who taught me to love. If there is bravado, it is because I still believed that identity was something you could sculpt out of desire and momentum.

The next sections—Growing Pains and The Age of Unbecoming—were written several years later, in 2004–2006, just before I became a father. Those books live in the hinge-space between recklessness and responsibility. They are written by someone who senses that life is about to become permanent, but does not yet understand what permanence demands. Fatherhood was on the horizon, close enough to change the light but not close enough to explain it. These books are marked by a subtle anxiety: the feeling that the path you set yourself on as a young adult is beginning to harden, and that your future self will have to answer for choices your younger self made casually.

Calvin, too, stands on that threshold. He does not yet see the consequences forming behind him, but the reader can. The writer could feel them, even if he didn’t yet have the vocabulary to name them.

And then there is A Pleasant Fiction. Written in 2024, after the deaths of both my parents and my brother, it is a book from a different country—one separated by a border you can only cross through grief. I was fifty-one when I wrote it, old enough to understand that memory does not behave chronologically, and that love is easiest to see in retrospect. The book’s nonlinear structure reflects the way loss dislocates time: a single recollection can collapse decades, and grief can make a forty-year-old memory feel urgent in the present tense.

Nothing in A Pleasant Fiction could have been written by the version of me who wrote Becoming Calvin. Nor could the young man who was newly married have anticipated the emotional topography of middle age—the responsibilities, the absences, the funerals, the silences that follow. A Pleasant Fiction is not a book written with craft alone; it is written by someone who has lived through the dismantling of the world he once assumed was permanent.

This is where the comparison to Boyhood comes in—not as a gimmick but as a structural truth. Linklater’s film works because he let the camera record the actual passage of time: the actors age, their bodies change, their voices deepen, their eyes tell different truths. You cannot imitate that with makeup or digital effects. Time is not an aesthetic; it is a presence.

Unintentionally, the Calvin duology does something similar. The early chapters carry the momentum of a man in his twenties. The middle sections are written by someone bracing for adulthood’s permanence. The final book is shaped by someone who has buried the people who raised him. You do not need to know the biography to feel these shifts—they are embedded in the sentences, the pacing, the concerns of each narrative moment.

What emerged, without plan or design, is a longitudinal portrait of consciousness: a character who ages because the writer aged, a worldview that widens because the writer lived long enough to understand what had once confused him. Calvin does not simply grow up in these books; he grows up with me, sometimes against me, sometimes ahead of me.

Literature often compresses decades of emotional experience into the narrow window of a single creative period. That is its magic. But the Calvin books do the opposite: they expand across the real decades of a life. Each phase contains what that particular version of me understood—and more importantly, what he didn’t understand. Readers sometimes notice the stylistic evolution, the shifts in tone, the way the moral and emotional questions deepen. They are not reading a refinement of craft; they are reading the sediment of time.

This is why the project matters to me in a way I never expected. It is not simply a coming-of-age story or a meditation on grief. It is a record of the self as it changed—first in hope, then in anticipation, then in mourning, then in something more spacious and honest than either optimism or despair.

Boyhood was filmed across twelve years. The Calvin cycle was written across twenty-six. One was intentional; one accidental. But both are documents of what happens when time becomes a collaborator.

If there is a single thread connecting these books—one that may not be visible on a first read but becomes undeniable on reflection—it is this: you cannot write middle age when you are young, and you cannot write youth when you are grieving. Each era has its own clarity and its own blindness. Each voice can only speak from where it stands.

In that sense, Calvin is not simply a character. He is a conversation partner I kept meeting at different stages of my life. He is the echo that allowed me to hear what time had done to me.

And perhaps that is the final function of these books, the quiet one beneath the narrative arcs and the grief and the memory: they show a life not as it was planned, but as it unfolded. They show how understanding accumulates. How loss reorders meaning. How a young man’s bravado becomes a father’s humility becomes a middle-aged man’s clarity.

That is the project I did not intend to create. Time wrote it with me anyway.

Javier

© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.